Exposing WiFi Passwords in Windows10

With the holidays here and folks traveling around, this tip might prove useful. Your mother-in-law can't find the custom WiFi password you set on her router, so she calls you for help as she wants to get her friend connected to her network. You can easily expose the password of the network you are currently connected to via the Network Connections GUI. Hit Start--> type ncpa.cpl and hit enter. This will open the Network Connections dialog. Right-click the active WiFi connection and click Status. Next click the Wireless Properties button. Within the window that appears next, click the Security tab, then click "Show characters" as highlighted below. This will display the password of the network you are currently connected to.

Great, that reveals my current network but what about my mother-in-law's network at her house? Since I have connected to her network previously on this same PC, I can reveal the password using CMD or PowerShell. Open either a CMD or PowerShell window in Admin mode (right-click the start button, look about half way down). Enter the following command first to reveal the SSID names of all saved networks on this PC.

netsh wlan show profiles

In this particular example I'm interested in exposing the password for the network called "house" as highlighted.

Next, run the following command to reveal the saved password for this network.

netsh wlan show profile name="house" key=clear

This will expose all settings for this wireless network including the password in clear text as highlighted below.